Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 647: The Caves of Androzani, Episode One
Dear diary,
Right then! It feels like an age since I’ve had the chance to say this, but The Caves of Androzani is one of those Doctor Who stories that people always cite as being an absolute ‘classic’. A full-on, 10/10. In 2009, it was even voted the number one story out of the programme’s first 200, by the readers of Doctor Who Magazine. I’ve seen it before, mostly, and I have to admit that I didn’t really find it much better or worse than any other tale. I can hear you sharpening your pitchforks now. I’m hoping that on this occasion, I’ll finally understand just what all the fuss is about, and even though it means saying goodbye to Peter Davison, I’ll admit that I’ve been looking forward to reaching this point.
I think the highlight in today’s episode has to be the cliffhanger. Or, rather, the cliffhangers. They just keep piling up at the end here, don’t they? Not in a bad way, where it feels like the episode just needs to end already (which is a problem I had with Enlightenment), but in the sense that the situation just gets more and more unavoidable. The Doctor and Peri are in a cell, awaiting execution, when suddenly… a door slides open and someone is watching them! Cliffhanger? Not yet. The guards come to the cell to retrieve the pair, and it appears to be empty, but the camera pulls back, and our heroes haven’t managed to escape! Cliffhanger? Not yet. The Doctor and Peri are lined up before a firing squad and say their final words, before the hoods are pulled over their faces. Cliffhanger? Not yet.
That’s really the point, because in any other Doctor Who story, that moment would be the cliffhanger. Our leads would make their final declarations, the squad would take aim, prepare to fire, and just as the order comes… we’d crash into the closing titles. At the start of the next episode, we’d get a reprise followed swiftly by someone bursting into the room to delay the execution. Or something would cause a distraction, giving time for the Doctor and Peri to make a run for it. Something would come along at just the right second to spare their lives. Here, though, we’re really kept guessing, because we close on the shot of the guns firing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know how they escape this cliffhanger, but it doesn’t lessen the impact one jolt - it’s a striking way to close the episode, and shows that they’re really not letting Davison’s Doctor go out easily…
Elsewhere… are we still abroad? Planet of Fire took us all the way to Lanzarote to film the vistas of Sarn, but here we’re back in the UK… and we might as well be in Lanzarote! I meant to bring up yesterday how much better the location work was in that episode compared to some of the earlier ones (the smoking landscape, though artificially created, looks fantastic), but then we’ve got something almost as impressive here, too. It looks like we’ve got glass shots in place again to help give some extra scale to this week’s quarry, but it allows for some gorgeous wide shots of the Doctor and peri as they explore their new surroundings. You get the same sense of open space (perhaps even more so) that going all the way out to Lanzarote gave us, but done at home! I’ve often thought of this story and the last one as having very similar landscapes, but looking at it here, I can see how wrong I was on that count. It’s similar in scope, but has a completely different feel to Sarn, and I’m really impressed by it!
